


Contest and Concurance

by TopHat



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 09:51:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20864270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat





	Contest and Concurance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dudewheresmytea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dudewheresmytea/gifts).

Some gods, Eris considered, had all the luck.

Poseidon, lord of more than two thirds of the world, collecting tax on every traveler through his domain, who'd damn sure never had to beg for a scrap of worship. Dionysus, more drunk than not these days, had long since abandoned both the pretense of restraint and the form of man to lay with whichever mortal tart or nymph caught his eye. Ares, whose temples overflowed with sacrifices, who sat atop a mountain of corpses ready to rival Zeus, sharing none with his daughter. She could go on, but cataloguing all the men she hated in the halls of Olympus would take too long, even by an immortal’s standards.

The goddesses weren’t much better. Aphrodite’s greatest concern was over which eligible bachelor she’d be sleeping with instead of her husband, a trial of such insignificant proportions that Eris had to wonder how she’d ended up at the top (fucking, probably). Hera spent most of her days bemoaning her husband’s infidelities and doing precisely fuck-all about it (the mismatch of word and deed aroused only contempt in Eris). Demeter still hadn’t gotten over her daughter’s elopement and spent half of every year taking it out on the rest of the world (at this point Eris wasn’t sure she whether a sudden change of heart by Hades would affect anything, or if the past few millenia of spite had simply doomed humans to the perhaps-needless misery of winter). Pathetic, to spend so much attention on a deal long-since made, but the old woman had settled down enough that mocking her for it had become a dead horse.

With that said, the casual irritation that rolled off the woman every fall buoyed Eris for weeks, a fact that she had no intent of broadcasting.

“You’re plotting,” Athena said, her voice like old paper being parted by a letter opener.

Eris smiled, arching against the cloud. If she stayed cold enough the water wouldn’t condense against her, her dewdrop-soft pillow perfectly intact. “You don’t know that.”

A _tisk_, a wheel-lock striking flint against metal, the kind of sound which let Eris know trouble was on the horizon. “Yes I do. Any time you’re not occupied, you’re plotting something.”

“You’re no fun at all,” Eris groaned, rolling over and reaching out. When she felt nothing at the edge of the cloud, Eris opened her eyes.

The field below was dark, but not silent. Campfires lay in haphazard lines, the sounds of men going about their evening duties wafting up below. Benedict Arnold and Horatio Gates had gone to bed angry, and the miasma their conflict created still drifted throughout the camp, filling the air with a menacing gloom that smelled like ash and licorice.

Above it all stood Athena, naked as the day Eris had first seen her bathing in the Hudson, and to Eris's eyes almost more perfect than the Goddess of lust.

“Stop manipulating them,” Athena said, and if the order didn’t rumble with the weight of thunder it was only because that was her father’s gimmick.

Eris smiled, the thrill of danger banishing the last of her tiredness. “Would you believe me if I said that it wasn’t entirely my fault?”

“Only because you couched your statement.” One moment Athena was staring down at an encampment of armed farmers. The next moment she appeared beside Eris, seized her by the shoulder, and hurled the other goddess down through the cloud cover.

Eris could’ve resisted. She could’ve dissolved into smoke, or disappeared into a bad mood, or found one of the countless petty arguments going on around the world to find shelter in. Athena may have been a god of war, worshipped since time immemorial and known even now, but Eris was also a god. A battle between the two of them would be pointless, infinite wellsprings crashing into one another until the force of the conflict drove them both away, only differentiated from purgatory by the expenditures of near-meaningless energy. Eris could reasonably expect to be able to lock horns with Athena until the gold on Apollo's chariot peeled into nothingness, to match force against a being who was all but_made_ of force, and come out something less than a victor.

Instead Eris let herself fall, because sometimes it was more fun to yield than to win.

Eris impacted the river, slipping through the water frictionlessly at speeds that turned the world into a smear of color and pressure. The locations was a spite, one Athena would’ve calculated from the moment she heard Eris’s laughter, when two instances of femininity looked into one another, and gray irises met pits of stars.

Those same cloudy eyes appeared in front of Eris, faster than musket fire and louder than a canon, the instant more than long enough to appreciate for someone with all the time in the world. Athena’s lips crashed into hers, gunpowder and iron filings and ink, tasted before all those years ago after Troy, when Eris had laughed over the corpse of a nation, forever after remembered as truly dangerous by both the gods who'd once mocked her and the poor mortal brought up to Olympus to witness her victory.

“Stop your meddling,” Athena growled, impossible bubbles rising in the gap between their breaths, pinning Eris to the river bottom.

Eris bared her teeth, struggling ineffectually against the arm across her chest, testing her deceptively-slim fingers against cord-like muscle, finding the former wanting. Easier to lift a portcullis with a spool of yarn. Easier to pluck a star from the sky. “Make me.”

The lips came crashing back, and Eris felt herself sink a little farther into the silt. A thought sent the filth spiraling away, whorls where eddies fought against one another for dominance, one of the small perks of being able to reshape the world with a thought. The change in terrain unsettled Athena. Not by much and not for long, but all temporal events were exactly as long as they needed to be when you could spend centuries like cents.

Eris writhed away Athena’s legs, pulling her closer. A twist, half kicking off the ground, half _willing_ the tangled water to spin her, and suddenly it was Athena with her back to bedrock.

“Convince me,” Eris whispered, fingers sliding over Athena’s skin while peppering kisses along her collarbone. “Tell me why I should not plunge this pathetic nation into chaos.”

Eris bit down and sucked, drawing a hiss from Athena that sent a bolt of fire to Eris's own loins. Entitled brat or no, Zeus’s get made the _best_ noises.

Rather than respond, Athena curled one leg around Eris and started grinding. Eris took that as an invitation for more, and began working a hand down between them, slowly nibbling her way back up, lavishing each wound with a kiss and a generous lick.

“Tell me what’s so special about these men. Tell me why you tempt fate when stealing a march. Tell me why you’d _debase_ yourself when you found out I’d begun to have some _fun_.” Eris punctuated each sentence with movements of her fingers, hunting for responses, finding them. “What can you do to make this worth my while?"

Athena seized against Eris, the first of many spasms. Eris pulled herself away from the line of purple/black that stretched from collarbone to the curl of ear and kissed Athena again, sloppy and mismatched, a little more just-not-quite together that would drive her mad. “What plot are _you_ setting in motion? What room is there in it for me, the one without a plan? Or did you hope that I’d simply fade away and never trouble your dreams again?”

Another cry, soft and pathetic, and Eris swallowed it whole. “What do you see at the end of this war? A final victory? Something to hold of Ares for the next few decades, until some other battle catches your fancy? A drop of intrigue to spice up the centuries with?”

They had both begun to come apart. Gods were not made to exist in singularity, and in times of excitement it was always easier to simple unravel, either into strands of fantasy or things less coherent. For Eris that meant evaporating into the emptiness between lights, her mind expanding into a steadily-growing awareness of the borderlines, where one person ended and another began, where the great lie of a discrete universe became less believable than usual. A little bit like death, a lot like an orgasm, and more soothing than words could express.

She could only hope that Athena found it half as much fun.

As they both became more and more themselves, Eris smiled against Athena’s lips, slowing time for just a moment, just long enough to squeeze out a few more words before they both went entirely metaphysical.

“Or did you create something complicated because you knew I couldn’t resist a snare?”

* * *

A single human heartbeat passed.

* * *

They were back on top of the clouds, and Athena was dressing for war. That meant something different than it had a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, or any other number of hundreds of years ago. Today, her uniform was a brown jacket, thigh-length and worn, with boots made for long marches. Her hair lay curled under a hat, one side turned up, and underneath the jacket she wore a peasant’s garments, a white shirt and brown pants, both rough-hewn and easy to remove.

Eris smiled from where she was reclining.

No matter the outfit, Athena made it look _good_.

“Will you obey?”

And now she was pointing a rifle at Eris.

Eris rolled over onto her belly and looked down at the encampment below. “Play your games. I’ll have worship enough without your interference.”

Athena left. She didn’t usually stick around long after their trysts. Eris tried not to take it personally. Instead, she turned her attention to the threads of the brewing conflict. Some were personal, yes, spats between people. Some were bigger, tied up in wars which outlived any and all mortals who understood them. Some were simply thin, tangentially connected, one or two steps removed.

It was the last type that Eris plucked. Plucked, not cut, because that was the domain of Fate. Plucked, not tied, because that was Aphrodite’s schtick, or Hera's, or any of the 'respectable' goddesses. No, Eris contented herself with a pluck, a hum, a single note discordant with the world, a feeling of wrongness in the string’s owner, in the composite threads which reached every French citizen. Not all of them would pay attention, as life was pain and took effort to live, but for some it would be the difference between noticing and not noticing the arrival of a new world power.

One without monarchs.

Eris let the string of a nation hum under her fingers, and smiled at the sound of a world ripe for revolution.


End file.
